Foods high in sugar are unhealthy, but these additives are too delicious for many of us to give up or reduce in a way. What if we could somehow enjoy their taste without actually eating them? A student team has now designed a spoon with a structure that stimulates taste buds（味蕾）to produce a sense of sweetness without adding calories or chemicals. The project follows previous work involving flavor-enhancing cutlery like chopsticks that increase sweetness with a mild electric current. 

The five undergraduate and graduate research students wanted to create a new spoon called Sugarware for people with such disorders as diabetes, with which sugar is largely off their menu. 

The new spoon would have several bumps（凸起） on its underside to press against the tongue. The bumps can be covered with a permanent layer of molecules（分子）called ligands. These ligands bond with taste-cell receptor proteins that typically react to sugar molecules or artificial sweeteners. The bond can activate nerve signals, causing the brain to register a sense of sweetness. A diner could thus stimulate sweetness receptors without actual intake of sugar or artificial sweeteners. 

This idea is similar to the previous work in that they all use cutlery to enhance taste without a user having to actually consume any sugar. "But the mechanism for stimulating the taste buds is completely different, " Shiyu Xu, one of the student researchers, says, " It uses bumps and taste-bud-stimulating molecules rather than electricity. "

The idea is "very creative, " says Paola Almeida, who is the global director of corporate innovation at candy maker Mars. But the product's commercial success would require a significant behavioral shift among consumers: instead of adding the usual sugar or artificial sweeteners, " now we're saying. 'Use this cutlery. '" Almeida says, "It remains to be seen whether flavor-enhancing cutlery will catch on. "

Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them. 

Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information, but they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism. To use a theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and project a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine, and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.

So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.

Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what's acceptable without facing the consequences of "real life."

Russia is launching a new module (舱) for the International Space Station(ISS), after more than a decade of delays. The Nauka module is set to lift off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on top of a Proton-M rocket at around 15:00 GMT today, along with a new robotic arm for the station created by the European Space Agency.

The ISS is composed of modules and equipment from different space agencies including Europe, Japan and Canada, but the major part of the station is composed of two main sections, a Russian part and a US part. At 13 meters long and weighing more than 20 tonnes, Nauka, also called the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, will be among the largest in Russia's half.

After launch, Nauka will take eight days to reach the ISS. Once attached, it will act as a new centre for the Russian part of the station. "It's a science laboratory, and it also provides a lot of important service systems," says Anatoly Zak, editor of a website. Planned research includes biological and materials science experiments. "It's a step in making the Russian part more independent (from the US part)." This includes a new toilet inside the module and sleeping rooms for the crew.

The launch of Nauka has been a long time coming, with construction of the module beginning in the 1990s. Technical and supply issues since then, such as the loss of components from Ukraine following the Russian annexation (兼并) of Crimea in 2014, have seen development stumble (蹒跚而行). "It's much more complex than anything the Russian space programme has tried to build in the last few years," says Zak. Russia's last module — Rassvet — was carried to the ISS by a US spacecraft in 2010.